Welcome to Owner Impacts, a series dedicated to showcasing innovations, solutions, and leadership driven by our employee-owners—and powered by our people-first culture.

In addition to building on our world-class safety program in response to the health crisis caused by COVID-19, grassroots innovation by forward-thinking team members led to an intuitive, industry-leading platform that is a result of our people-first culture. Shawmut Vitals—a custom-built platform designed to check for COVID-19 symptoms and manage contact tracing—reveals a creative and critical use of technology to provide a safety solution during a global pandemic.

A result of true innovation by Shawmut’s people, the platform utilizes real-time data to drive actionable steps to minimize and reduce infectious disease spread—capturing live, paperless statistics to directly ensure the safety of our people and partners. Here’s how our people did it.

Grassroots Innovation

With a culture that empowers Shawmut’s innovative, forward-thinking people, our field teams looked to further reduce hand-to-hand and face-to-face interaction for our staff and partners working onsite. Stemming from grassroots innovation, our people developed potential systems that were both simple and effective. Identifying a breakthrough by utilizing a QR Code, field teams piloted a system that enabled contactless health screenings while gathering live, accessible data. When subcontractors responded enthusiastically to the prototype—reaffirming how it made them feel secure to work on our sites while saving valuable time—the pilot was flagged to leadership as a concrete protocol that could be repurposed on other projects.

Shawmut leadership understood the potential—and impact—an intuitive, user-friendly system could have on ensuring the safety of teams on a national scale.

Record Development and Rollout

With Shawmut’s talent-driven and leading-edge culture at the core of everything we do, leadership looked inward to our people to tackle the challenge of developing a platform entirely in-house. Shawmut’s Information Technology, Safety, and Marketing teams partnered with our field staff to design an application and secure database that would be easily integrated into existing systems. IT leveraged Shawmut’s partnership with Microsoft to engage technologies already deployed in our offices and in the field, allowing the team to develop a unique virtual platform that is both highly reliable and tremendously secure through a cloud data source. Partnering on development, training, packaging, and communication, Shawmut’s people took the state-of-the-art platform to market with unprecedented speed— transforming the idea from concept to rollout in under two weeks.

Key Capabilities

At its core, Shawmut Vitals is just as innovative as the people who built it. Designed to check for COVID-19 and other sickness symptoms—while integrating contact tracing to minimize and control infectious disease spread—the platform is accessed by users scanning a QR Code from their mobile device, which brings them instantly to a project-specific survey. With real-time data shared with site superintendents, the platform flags individuals experiencing COVID-19 symptoms or those who may have been exposed to someone who is either infected or at-risk—allowing teams to take immediate action. The process is paperless, reduces hand-to-hand and face-to-face interaction, and provides project teams with live, easily accessible data that’s integrated directly with Shawmut’s safety systems.

Commitment to World-Class Safety

A leading-edge, unmatched platform, Shawmut Vitals furthers our commitment to driving a culture of safety throughout the industry. Just as impressive, Shawmut’s people continue to define what it means to own it—showcasing true grassroots innovations to address a worldwide challenge and ensuring that safety remains our absolute top priority.